garfieldfandomcom-20200223-history
User blog:TeeJay87/Thoughts About Garfield Originals
Recently the premiere episode of Garfield Originals has been shown to broader audience on YouTube and we, the Wiki admins, managed to watch it there. It has been followed by the recently posted episode 2, which I made familiar with while writing this blog entry. I thought about sharing my feelings about this new Garfield cartoon, which was long-awaited by many fans, including few individuals who simply could not wait for the official premiere on television due to France.tv's policy. Overview As you can see in the screencap provided in the right, Garfield Originals was mostly created by Philippe Vidal and his French crew, with the assistance of Jim Davis and Kim Campbell. This means that it counts as the first Garfield cartoon made without Mark Evanier's cooperation. Just like the creators announced, the cartoon does not have any dialogues. The only voices, which can be heard, are mostly mumbling, yells and other inarticulated speech, performed by Veronique Soufflet (Arlene's voice in French'' The Garfield Show), Gerard Surugue (Garfield's voice in the same cartoon) and Antoine Schoumsky (apparently responsible for additional voices in the cartoon). The first striking trait of the cartoon is the length of the episodes - none of the ones I have seen so far is longer than 3 minutes. Typical Garfield and Friends segments have a duration of 6 minutes and 7 minutes long, which counts as approximately 20 minutes for one episode, The Garfield Show episodes had a similar length from what I recall. Such shortening makes it difficult to enjoy the cartoon, even if it does not have much to offer the audience (read the following text below). Pros *Garfield has always had fewer cartoons and TV shows than its rivals from Warner Bros animation studios (such as ''Tom & Jerry or The Looney Tunes), thus any new cartoon adds to the variety. *The short duration of the episodes makes it easier to fit a schedule in a TV channel filled with programs, 3 minutes can be easily found for a broadcast. *Garfield in those cartoons behaves faithfully to the comics and GAF with his selfish attitude shown in both of published episodes. Davis's and Campbell's touch can really be seen here - for example, see the dinner with Arlene in Rototos episode. *The lack of dialogues means that the cartoon does not need to be translated as deeply as older motion pictures required, it only applies to the episode titles. Such simplification does help in selling the license to foreign TV stations, as anyone with sight can watch this cartoon without the trouble of understanding it. *The idea of Garfield winking as a separator between the scenarios is quite a nice one, reminds me of some good 1980s cartoons which had the TV show's logo as such separator (Transformers Generation One is one of those). Cons *The jokes in this new Garfield cartoon are on a rather low level - the first episode is focused on burping, which gets quickly predictable. The second episode is minimally better in this department, as everything there revolves about Garfield having issues with sleep. After watching two scenarios, you can predict what will happen in the remaining episode's scenarios. *Garfield's burping concert in the Rototos episode looks too much similar to The Great Wakkarotti ''from the Animaniacs - both the idea and the way Garfield performs seem cliched. Not to mention I do not belong to fans of such humour. *The style the characters are drawn in resembles Jim Davis's works, though it is visible at first glance that the characters were drawn by someone else. While watching the episodes and image galleries here, notice that the characters (except the spiders) do not have black outlines, only brown, which might be a heritage of the French 19th Century Impressionist painting school (Jean Monet and other representatives of that style did not use black in their paintings). Moreover, the character designs look different than their traditional depictions - while still recognizable as themselves, the way they look somehow does not appeal to me. *Arlene's design suffers most from the style replacement - she lost her teeth gap she had in the comic strips (her trademark) and in the Rototos episode, she has blue eye outlines, which look like fixed tears. Even if she is my least favourite Garfield's date, I find those changes in her GO design as flaws. *In both episodes, the mice look exactly the same, as if they were cloned from Squeak. I really miss the mice from Garfield and Friends where each mouse had own unique design, and Floyd even had two colour schemes; even the mice from The Garfield Show had more variety within their ranks. As for me - a big drawback. *The lack of dialogues makes the cartoon more difficult to enjoy, as there are no gags that were common in GAF and on a lesser scale, in TGS. Cheap situational jokes will not replace good humour. Conclusion I did not expect much from ''Garfield Originals in terms of quality, but even with such an approach, the cartoon itself is quite disappointing. The listed above drawbacks take over the positives of the cartoon, making it difficult to enjoy. Its short duration, lack of dialogues, cheap humour and the style I do not find appealing make the impression that Dargaud Media has made a cartoon for less-demanding audiences as if they wanted to create in a hurry a cartoon to silence Garfield fans urging to have it created. Perhaps I have greater expectations than the standard audience nowadays, but witnessing a quality decline from Garfield and Friends ''through ''The Garfield Show ''till ''Garfield Originals ''is not a positive feeling for any true Garfield fan. Alleged treating clients like mindless cattle by the cartoon creator only adds to the grief. I can give ''Garfield Originals 4,5/10 note, only because the cartoon remains faithful to the comic strips. Too bad it is the only GO's real advantage. GAF = Garfield and Friends TGS = The Garfield Show GO = Garfield Originals Category:Blog posts Category:Blog posts